CHILDREN’S RIGHT TO DIE

In November, 1973, the publishers of Modern Medicine, a Canadian medical journal that is published all over the world. read an article I had written about euthanasia in a law journal.  They asked for my permission to publish my article in their journal. I gave them my permission. At the end of my f0ur-page article, I wrote the following paragraph.

Consider the case of 1927 that took place in the United States when a man who had watched his little daughter dying of tuberculous and gangrene in her face heard her screaming for months on end driving him mad. He took the pitiful creature into his bathroom and drowned her to end her agony. His jury returned a verdict of not guilty knowing that he acted out of remorse and that his act was a humane act. They knew that he would suffer forever, never being able to block out of his mind the sight of his little girl grasping his arms and not making any attempt to fight the death which was going to end her misery. Justice Branson at his trial said, “It is a matter that gives food for thought when one comes to consider that had that poor child been an animal instead of a human being;  so far from there being anything blameworthy in the man’s action putting an end to its suffering, he would actually have been liable for punishment if he had not done so.”       

Soon after that article was published, I was invited to give a speech to approximately 100 doctors in the Toronto General Hospital about euthanasia. Prior to that speech, I was taken into a room where a six-year-old boy laid on a bed. I was told that from his birth until then, he couldn’t see or hear anything and he couldn’t even speak or cry. The only thing that he did was smile when he was fed food that he liked. He didn’t appear to be suffering from pain.

One of the doctors standing near the bed asked me, “If you could push a button that would end this little boy’s life painlessly, would you push it?”

I couldn’t give him an answer and to this day, I still cannot answer that question.  I was well aware that keeping him alive would cost the hospital many millions of the taxpayer’s money but is it possible that he has a functional mind in which he has dreams? 

Tracy Latimer was born November 23^rd, 1980. An interruption in Tracy's supply of oxygen during the birth caused cerebral palsy, leading to severe mental and physical disabilities including violent seizures, which were controlled with seizure medication.^[  She had little or no voluntary control of her muscles, wore diapers, and could not walk or talk. Her doctors described the care given by her family as being excellent. During her life, Tracy underwent several surgeries, including surgery to lengthen tendons and release muscles, and surgery to correct scoliosis in which rods were inserted into her back.

Tracy attended school regularly in the Town of Wilkie in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.  People who worked with Tracy in group homes and schools described her smile, love of music and happy reaction to horses at the circus.

There is no dispute that through her life, Tracy at times suffered considerable pain. As well, the quality of her life was limited by her severe disability. But the pain she suffered was not unremitting, and her life had value and quality.

In October 1993, Dr. Dzus recommended to Tracy’s parents that further  surgery was needed in the hope that it would lessen the constant pain in Tracy's dislocated hip. Depending on the state of her hip joint, the procedure might have been a hip reconstruction or it might have involved removing the upper part of her thigh bone, leaving the leg connected to her body only by muscles and nerves. The anticipated recovery period for this surgery was one year.

Tracy’s parents were told that this procedure would cause their daughter pain, and the doctors involved suggested that further surgery would be required in the future to relieve the pain emanating from various joints in Tracy's body. Dr. Dzus reported that "he post-operative pain could be unbearable, and described the only useful short-term solution would being the use of an epidural to anesthetize the lower part of the body and help alleviate pain while Tracy was still in he hospital.

On October 24, 1993, Tracy’s mother found Tracy dead. She had died under the care of her father while the rest of the family was at church. At first Robert Latimer maintained that Tracy had died in her sleep however, when confronted by police who had autopsy evidence in their hands  that showed that Tracy had  high levels of carbon monoxide that were found in Tracy's blood, he changed his story. Latimer then confessed that he had killed her by placing her in his truck and connecting a hose from the truck's exhaust pipe to the cab. He said he had also considered other methods of killing Tracy that had included  a Valium overdose and shooting her in the head. An overdose of sleeping pills would have been more merciful.

Robert Latimer said his actions were motivated by love for Tracy and a desire to end her pain. His motive was no different than that of the man in 1927 who drowned his daughter in the bathtub to ease her permanent pain.

He described the medical treatments Tracy had undergone and was scheduled to undergo as "mutilation and torture." With the combination of a feeding tube, rods in her back, the leg cut and her flopping around her bed and suffering from bedsores, her father asked the police this rhetorical question, “How can people say she was a happy little girl?”

Mr. Latimer was charged with first-degree murder, convicted of second-degree murder by a jury, and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 10 years. He subsequently lost an appeal to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal. However, in February 1996, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed to hear a further appeal and in June 1996, the original Crown prosecutor was charged with attempting to obstruct justice through jury tampering. In February 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada ordered a new trial for Mr. Latimer.

After a new trial, Mr. Latimer was again found guilty of second-degree murder in late 1997. At the sentencing hearing, Mr. Latimer’s lawyer argued that he should be given a “constitutional exemption,” or that the judge should find the mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years to be “cruel and unusual punishment” in the circumstances, and therefore a violation of Mr. Latimer’s rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On the first of December, 1997, in a decision that surprised most legal commentators, the sentencing judge found that a 10-year sentence would indeed be “grossly disproportionate” to the offence. He sentenced Mr. Latimer to two years less a day, half of which would be served in a provincial jail and half on his farm. In 2001. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Mr. Latimer's crime could not be justified through the defence of necessity, and found that, despite the special circumstances of the case, the lengthy prison sentence given to Mr. Latimer was not cruel and unusual, and therefore not a breach of section 12 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Court also ruled that Mr. Latimer was not denied rights to jury nullification, as no such rights exist, and his prison sentence was thus upheld.

Robert Latimer began serving his sentence on January 18^th, 2001 and was incarcerated at William Head Institution, a minimum-security facility located 30 kilometers west of Victoria, BC, on Vancouver Island. While in prison, he completed the first year of carpentry and electrician apprenticeships. He continued to run his family's farm while in prison with the help of a farm manager.

On December 5^th, 2007 Robert Latimer requested day parole from the National Parole Board in Victoria, BC. He told the parole board that he believed killing his daughter was the right thing to do. The board denied his request, saying that Latimer had not developed sufficient insight into his actions, despite psychological and parole reports that said he was a low risk to reoffend unless he was put into the same situation again. In January 2008, lawyer Jason Gratl filed the appeal on Latimer's behalf, arguing that in denying parole the board had violated its own rules by requiring admission of wrongdoing and by ignoring the low risk for reoffending. In February 2008, a review board overturned the earlier parole board decision, and granted Latimer day parole stating that there was low risk that Latimer would re-offend. Latimer was released from William Head Prison and began his day parole in Ottawa in March. On his release he stated that he planned to press for a new trial and for identification of the pain medication that the 2001 Supreme Court ruling suggested he could have used instead of killing his daughter.

He subsequently moved to Victoria, where he was required to live in a half-way house five days a week and an apartment two days a week. In July 2010 the National Parole Board denied his request to be allowed to leave the halfway house for five days a week. On appeal to the Federal Court of Canada in August 2010 the board was ordered by Madam Justice Mactavish to review its decision. The National Parole Board was also directed by the Judge to apply the least restrictive conditions consistent with society's protection. Latimer was consistently assessed as having a low risk of re-offending. 

On November 29, 2010, Robert Latimer was granted full parole. The loosening of Latimer's parole restrictions took effect on December 6^th, 2010

A 1999 poll found that 73% of Canadians believed that Latimer acted out of compassion and should have received a more lenient sentence. The same poll found that 41% believe that mercy killing  should be legal.  Ethicist  Arthur Schafer argued that Robert Latimer was "the only person in Canadian history to spend even a single day in prison for a mercy killing" and that compassion and common sense dictated a reduced sentence and the granting of parole. In their introductory college course book, The Elements of Moral Philosophy,  Robert Latimer's actions sympathetically motivated  so Lattimer still thinks that he did the right thing when he killed is daughter.

I am not going to form an opinion as to whether he did the right thing since I would have to be in his shoes to form an opinion as to what I would do if one of my daughters was as permanently ill as Latimer’s daughter was. However, I would never put a child into a cab of a vehicle and pump carbon monoxide into the cab of a motor vehicle so that the child would to slowly suffocate to death.

When a terminally ill 17-year-old became the first minor to exercise the right to die in Belgium, a public outcry ensued, with some saying that the removal of an age limit on euthanasia denies children the right to life. In fact, Belgium's law strengthens that right.

 Since 2002, Belgium has permitted terminally or incurably ill adults to request and receive euthanasia from a doctor. In February 2014, the Belgian parliament removed the provision of the country’s law on euthanasia that restricted the law’s use to only adults. That led to the outcry.

Predictably, the uproar resumed in September 2016, when the first child rin Belgium equested and received euthanasia. Cardinal Elio Sgreccia, speaking on Radio Vatican, said that the Belgian law denies children the right to life. But the circumstances of the case, and the fact that it took two and a half years for this to happen, shows just the opposite. The Belgian law respects the right to life  and in carefully defined circumstances, the right to die.

Although Belgium’s euthanasia law now has no specific age requirement thus differing from Dutch legislation, which permits doctors to provide euthanasia, on request, to minors who are at least 12 years old.  The law does require the person requesting euthanasia to have a demonstrable capacity for rational decision-making. This effectively excludes very small children from the law’s scope. The request must be examined by a team of doctors and a psychiatrist or psychologist, and requires the approval of the minor’s parents. The minor has to be in a hopeless medical situation of constant and unbearable suffering that cannot be eased and which will invariably cause death in the short term.

There are few if any more terrible experiences in a parent’s life than to watch his or her child suffer painfully from an incurable disease. There isn’t a more difficult decision for a parent to make than to decide if the child would be better off if euthanized.  There is nothing more stupid than a religious twit to say to you that that your god will eventually ease the suffering of your child’s insufferable, never ending pain by praying to that god which may or may not exist.

The taxpayers may very well be sympathetic to the parents who are daily watching and hearing their child suffering from non-stop intense pain and begging to die but after millions of taxpayer’s dollars have been spent year after year just so that the child’s parents can see their living child; there  has to be an end to the child’s suffering and the monetary drain on the public purse.